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The cost of cloud

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Re: The cost of cloud

#101

Post by throwaway984393 »

"I use AWS for a lot of things, but I strongly regard the cloud as just another tool, to be used as occasion demands, rather than because the high priests say you should."

He's right. Evaluate your needs and use it if it makes sense. Not a very controversial opinion, I think!

The problem is, how do you evaluate your needs if you aren't an expert in either self-hosting or using managed services (AWS)? I think you should treat it like going to a doctor: get two opinions from two different senior professionals in two different specializations. And definitely make an assessment based on real numbers. Try to get ballpark figures from similar-sized businesses about their costs (capex/opex, infrastructure, staff) and requirements (expertise, time-to-market, FRs/NFRs, regulations, etc). Building a business is a huge thing, and how you use technology can either be a hindrance or an accelerator, but it has to fit your use case.

Re: The cost of cloud

#102

Post by BizyDev »

Mid sized cloud companies like OVH, Scaleway, Hetzner or Infomaniak are the way to go for me.

But here's is the point that's completely missing from the article. Many choices in organisations are leaded by two wrong drivers :

- Career risk awareness : like we said in the good old days, nobody was fired for buying Sun Microsystems. Same thing applies for Azure and AWS. You're not paying the bill so why looking for a cheaper alternative that might cost you personally a lot. - CV driven decision : on your CV it's better and more valuable to have 3 years of Azure/AWS than having 3 years on OVH/Hetzner/etc.

Finally, as a leader in an organisation, it's always easier to follow the trend rather than trying to convince your coworkers to follow you to a more "exotic" solution.

Re: The cost of cloud

#103

Post by agrippanux »

Maybe tangent to this but I am really enjoying Cloudflare Workers w/KV and Durable Objects. Currently running over 80% of my company’s infra on it and it’s a monthly cost under $50.

Re: The cost of cloud

#104

Post by hatesinterviews »

endisneigh wrote: post #28

I don't know why there are so many articles in this vain: - use the cloud until you're making so much money that you can afford to hire the sufficient talent to replicate cheaper. fin

How many organizations move either between clouds or off cloud entirely? I imagine for the former there’s some import tools in order to poach customers.

But between all the advanced proprietary software solutions and exorbitant egress fees, moving off cloud entirely is rather difficult.

Re: The cost of cloud

#105

Post by slac »

bushbaba wrote: post #12

Hiring your own security guard is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Hiring your own janitor is cheaper than paying an outsourcing firm. Building your own office is cheaper than renting one. Doing your taxes with pen and paper is cheaper than paying turbo tax. Making your own food is cheaper than eating out. Hiring a cook directly is cheaper than hiring sudexo. I could keep going. But sometimes it’s not just co…

Managing all of these careers is a big cost though in time and effort

Re: The cost of cloud

#106

Post by slac »

Have not seen this being mentioned yet, here goes:

Choosing a large cloud provider is often much greener than doing your own or using a smaller provider.

Carbon is a large cost.

GCP has been carbon neutral for over a decade, AWS and Azure have made big public commitments.

Sourcing clean energy for 1000s of servers is not always easy.

Re: The cost of cloud

#107

Post by kova12 »

trabant00 wrote: post #51
csydas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider this rude or blunt, but rather incomplete as I really am not sure what points are frustrating for you or what you would hope someone takes away from it -- I'm an outside observer on the cloud subject as I have seen huge debates over use of the public cloud internally at my company and also with client companies. I've seen the billing costs of the public cloud absolutely demolish an IT org's yearly bu…

When I'm frustrated I'm not exactly clear in my writing. You need to be able to do both options before having an opinion on which is appropriate in which case. I am suprised to have to state this. But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other. People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers (call them sysadmins, devops, etc).…

Sub 100k engineers are a fiction. Sure, you could get somebody on staff for under 100k salary, but it's not necessarily going to be someone competent.

But even aside from that: OK, you found somebody who agrees to work for 90k. What about social security tax? Group health coverage? Workman's comp insurance? HR support? Payroll? Risk of lawsuits if someone hurts them/their feelings?

Re: The cost of cloud

#108

Post by Thristle »

dijit wrote: post #84
Thristle wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is small? In terms of cpu cores and memmory Cost in cloud is all about capacity and each cloud has very good tools to see where the money is going. It sounds like either what you consider small is not that or money is being wasted somewhere on things you are not aware of

I guess “small” is open for interpretation. Let’s say 720vCPU for the cluster and about 2.3TiB of memory. These would be quite small nodes if you bought them as machines in a datacenter. Most modern machines have 40+vCPU and 128G+ RAM each. I have 36machines in my GKE nodepool with 20vCPU and 64G of ram. So the aggregate totals sound high but it’s not many. In terms of real machines I could have fewer, like 18 or so.

that compute is much larger then startups i worked for that make millions of dollars/50+ M unique users per month. so obviously not "corporate" sized but definitely not small

Looking at the GKE price calc - N2 machines (which i have no idea if they are cheapest per vcpu/mem) * 7 will give you 896 vcpu and 3584 GB ram. that will cost you 21K per month for a zonal cluster

we can do napkin calculations but that won't help you. if you want to get your bill down you just need to open the billing reports and start slicing data by usage

Edit - i really hope i am not coming off as condescending or anything. I used to work in a startup related to cloud cost optimization and currently as a devops in a cloud env so i know how these costs can get out of hand.

Re: The cost of cloud

#109

Post by realityking »

southerntofu wrote: post #88
trabant00 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm frustrated I'm not exactly clear in my writing. You need to be able to do both options before having an opinion on which is appropriate in which case. I am suprised to have to state this. But in my experience people argue one option a lot without being to deliver the other. People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers (call them sysadmins, devops, etc).…

> People who know bare metal are rare these days from the total of available infrastructure engineers Sysadmins are not rare they're just not the people you hear about in Silicon Valley bubble anymore. 90+% of businesses haven't moved to the "cloud" (i.e. whoever the fuck's computer you can't get your hands on in case of problems) and even if they wanted to it would make no sense: most businesses just need a basic we…

> most businesses just need a basic website and an email/accounting

I think those businesses should definitely go to the Cloud - but not IaaS. Use Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for the email needs and a Website-as-a-service vendor, whether that’s wordpress.com or Webflow.

Re: The cost of cloud

#110

Post by realityking »

agrippanux wrote: post #103

Maybe tangent to this but I am really enjoying Cloudflare Workers w/KV and Durable Objects. Currently running over 80% of my company’s infra on it and it’s a monthly cost under $50.

Interesting. What workloads are you running there? Internal in-house built line of business apps?
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